Rocco Sollecito, a high-ranking member of Quebec's mafia, was shot and killed in Laval.

Organized crime expert James
Dubro says that there is likely an ongoing generational shift happening in the
Montreal mob leadership.

CTVNews.ca Staff

Published Friday, May 27, 2016
11:03AM EDT

Last Updated Friday, May 27, 2016
4:50PM EDT

Montreal mobster Rocco Sollecito
was gunned down in Quebec Friday morning, in a killing that experts say
illustrates a power vacuum created when mob boss Vito Rizzuto died.

Sollecito was found shot in his
car a few hundred metres away from Laval police headquarters. He was later
pronounced dead in a hospital.

Quebec provincial police
spokesman Jason Allard said no arrests had been made in the shooting. He did he
identify Sollecito, but said the man who died was 67.

"On the scene, naturally,
there were indications the event might be related to criminal
organizations," Allard added.

Sollecito was a close associate
of deceased Montreal mob boss Vito Rizzuto, who died of natural causes in 2013.
He was released just months ago after serving an eight-year prison sentence.

His name was mentioned during the
Charbonneau Commission, which looked at corruption in Quebec's construction industry.
Stefano Sollecito, his son, was arrested alongside Rizzuto's son Leonardo
Rizzuto, during a police drug raid last November.

Mafia expert Antonio Nicaso said
he sees the killing of Sollecito as a “generational challenge” to the several
men who made up the “old guard” alongside Rizutto.

Nicaso said one of the men --
Lorenzo Giordano -- has already been murdered and two others are in prison.

“It’s clear strategy to remove
from the map the old guard of the Rizzuto crime family,” he told CTV News
Channel. “It’s a powerful challenge, because he is targeting all the people who
ran the organization when Vito Rizutto was in prison.”

The Charbonneau Commission
“exposed some of (the Mafia’s) connections to politicians and businessmen,” so
the organization is in a rebuilding phase, he added.

Nicaso added that Montreal
remains a “strategic place” for the Mafia because of the contraband that flows
through the city’s port.

Organized crime expert James
Dubro said he agrees the hit signals a “generational shift,” with someone is
trying to eliminate the vestiges of Rizutto’s senior team.

“There’s one or two more who
might be hit,” he told CTV News Channel. “They’re in jail… but they can be hit
in jail too.”

Dubro said that the Mafia is not
as powerful as it used to be in Montreal, due to competition from other
criminal groups including Haitian street gangs and the Hells Angels.

“They don’t respect the Mafia the
way they once did,” he said. “Sometimes they work together, but sometimes they
don’t.

A retired Montreal police investigator
told The Canadian Press he suspects this was an “internal” hit, as opposed to a
rival clan. "They are just bleeding internal,” he said. “It was a
clean-up."